What is the pentagram

If you're interested learn music, There is a crucial element that you must learn to be able to read all those musical notes that you can bring to life with an instrument: the pentagram. Like all language, music is also encoded by a series of signs and symbols that allow us to write and communicate music, it is a very sophisticated system that gives us all the information we need to know to interpret a work musical.

In this lesson from a TEACHER you will learn what is the pentagram, a basic and important concept for music reading.

Index

1. Pentagram: easy definition
2. Staff elements
3. The dimensions of the pentagram
4. Origin and evolution of the pentagram

The staff It is a pattern that we use in music to write the musical notes, together all the symbols and elements that we can find in a score.

The staff is made up of 5 horizontal lines that are parallel to each other and 4 spaces that separate the lines. The lines on the staff are numbered from lowest to highest, in the same way for spaces. It is in these lines and spaces that musical notes are placed, assigning one note per line or per space.

When the notes are lower or higher than the first and last lines of the staff, we resort to using the callouts additional lines, which are placed only when required and also alternate with spaces. To know the name of the notes on the staff we must refer to the musical keys (treble clef, bass clef Y C key), which you can learn more about in other articles.

Sometimes the staves can be accompanied by others and joined by a line and / or a vertical key at the ends, we call this system and it indicates that the music to be interpreted in said staves must sound simultaneously. This can be observed in any musical group such as orchestras, where all the instruments are following the same reading but with their respective parts. We can also observe it in the scores of individual instruments that use both hands to play a wide range, such as piano and harp, using precisely 2 staves as a solo system.

Since the pentagram is a complete system that requires giving us all the necessary information for the interpretation of a work, it is to be expected that we will not only find the musical notes in it.

In short, elements that are written on the staff are:

• The musical notes
• the silences
• the key
• armor
• The metric
• indications of changes in volume, velocity, performance or dynamics

With the basic knowledge of the staff, you can start your journey in writing and reading music.

Image: Slideshare

Music is fascinating as a language, because if we compare musical writing with the writing of text of any language, music has two important qualities that must be written: tuning and rhythm. We say that music is a multidimensional language because we not only read the pitch, which is a vertical element, but also the rhythm interferes, which is a horizontal element that depends on the passage of time.

We will call you tuning at the level of a sound, a note. The appropriate term in musical language is "high" if it is a high sound, and "low" if it is a low sound. And then the rhythm is how often the notes appear on the staff.

The first appearance of a musical pattern happened during the Middle Ages, when a system was invented to write and read the Gregorian or plain chant, which was interpreted by voices and texts in Latin. The first system to be used was pneumatic notation, used between the 11th and 13th centuries. Neuma were groups of words with ornamentation and had a relative and imprecise intonation within a scale.

Although initially the works for the Gregorian singing were very simple, with a single voice or melodic line (which we call monody), over time the compositions became more complex with techniques such as polyphony (several voices or melodic lines), thus the writing system was adapting and evolving to write notes that could be read more accurately.

Another system in use previously was the "tetragram" (Tetra is a word that comes from the Greek and means 4). As its name indicates, in this system only 4 lines instead of 5 that we use now.

Finally, the pentagram we know now with the 5-line system, it was established around the XVII century and it's the one we've been using ever since.

If you want to read more articles similar to What is the pentagram, we recommend that you enter our category of Musical language.